04.03.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 36

So had my dad. His first car was a 1971 Ford Fairlane, which my grandfather gave him when he turned fifteen. His second was a 1985 Honda Accord, lead gray. His third was a 1990 BMW 850i, navy blue, which he killed my Uncle Neno with. His fourth is a Ford Ranger, smoke colored, which we are driving across the Atacama Desert as I write, looking out the window, considering the sky, considering that

it has no distance is therefore not even space but just nothing, for if you went to the moon, you’d have to go to the other moon, and if you went to the other moon, you’d have to go to still a further moon, and if you went to a further moon, how many more moons? How many snowflakes? How many snowstorms of snowflakes? of universes of moons do you have to visit before you’ll learn there is only no meas- urement and therefore no distance and therefore you must have a moon in your eye lash inside an atom of its tip and so roadtrips

do that to me. I mean, it gets pretty brillig all up in my slithy tove, so I calloo-callay beamishly, but you know what they say: when we refuse to consider the value of knowledge that is rooted in the body, in the psyche, in paralogical experience, we fail to challenge colonialist, post-Renaissance, Euro-Western conceptions of reality. And yet, it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of pollinators in our ecosystem. Take bees, for instance. A bee transfers pollen from a male flower to the lady bits of female flowers. A few days later, a baby watermelon or apple emerges. While bees are not the only pollinators we have (bats, birds, butterflies, and some flies can do this work, too), for a number of reasons, they’re by far the best creatures for the job. But back to the original question: if honeybees are raptured, are we ... done? “Everything I do has the smell of digital.” And the psychedelic pollution floating in the Gowanus Canal. Dear John, today marks the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Berta Cáceres, murdered by US-backed Honduran government-backed death squads on March 3. Like many who knew and worked with her, I was aware that this fighter for indigenous people wasn’t destined to die of old age. She spoke too much truth to power — not just for indigenous rights, but for women’s and LGBTQ rights, for authentic democracy, for the well-being of the earth, and for an end to tyranny by transnational capital and empire. Since her murder, it’s ever more clear what her community says: Berta did not die, she multiplied! Grassroots International is honored to stand with COPINH (the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, which she founded) to mark this day — both in La Esperanza and globally with ongoing activism and support. Grassroots International supporters have helped provide much-needed funding to COPINH to assist with additional security measures and also advance the vital organizing to protect the Lenca territory and sacred river from those seeking to privatize it. Soon we will share more information about actions you can take to support the “Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act” when it is reintroduced in Congress. This bill would end the US government financing of corrupt and repressive police and military forces in Honduras, implicated in hundreds of murders of community leaders like Berta. Fat chance of that passing. Did you ever wonder why fat chance and slim chance meant the same thing? ‘In Intuitionist Mathematics, it is posited that what we call infinity is equivalent to a pure human feeling.’ Did you know that either 18 or 19 US Presidents, depending on whether you count Buchanan, owned slaves?

Which translates as it’s extraordinary we might have ten years left and we might have thousands of climate change-induced attack dogs (no metaphor here, I mean actual canines) give or take infowars zero hedge and all phenomena are empty except those that make up the entire universe life turned out to have nothing to do with us don’t send love send bitcoin extinction rattle has anyone ever written so many songs for animals gulag vacation with unlimited stay. A structure in the center of the space — a sort of abbreviated house with half-built walls and uncovered studs — set the stage. As I looked around this structure the top portion of a wall concealed a man rocking back and forth in a folding chair. I could only see the bottom half of his body. His toes pressed against the floor, his heels against the front legs of the chair, and his hands were folded neatly in his lap. Dan. I had met Dan a few years earlier and saw him fairly often, but was surprised that some part of me not only knew the rhythm of his rocking, but also what his ankles looked like. I turned the corner and in another section of the structure I could see his whole body, again sitting on a sort of chair but now elevated much higher, leaning forward and staring into a television. He was slowly shaving his beard with an electric razor from top to bottom on one cheek. I was confused. I doubled back to the bottom half of the man I was so certain was Dan, to see if he was still there, and he was. This first Dan still sat in his chair rocking back and forth, while the second Dan persisted in shaving (so much that I thought he’d surely take off a layer of skin) and staring into the TV. Watching what? A worm being eaten alive by a woman competing for money. Since dolphins can’t move their faces, though, they always look like they’re I dunno, animals make lots of decisions, some decisions are minor, such as whether to walk to the right or left of a rock. Fwoosh!Fwoosh! Amen, Amen and Amen. What I mean to say is — what? A molecular robot is an artificial molecular system that is built by integrating molecular machines. The one developed by this research group is extremely small — about the size of a human cell. It consists of a molecular actuator, composed of protein, and a molecular clutch, composed of DNA. When the input DNA signal was ‘start,’ the clutch was turned ‘ON,’ and the robot changed shape. One said, “The barn was very large it smelled of hay, centaurs, and hookah pipes. To get there we hiked for three days, our legs were like leg-flavoured jelly. Maybe the cheese was attracting mice, I didn’t care because I am a friend of the Mouse People. A T a m 6 T dot I a U G l iiiiiiiiii 09876543210 1 woom moom woom moom moom Foom ooom ... w E m M m m T moom moom moom moom moom. ‘Come here!’ ‘Turn into a bee!’ etc. There are three beautiful shimmery frogs living in my sink: Max, Ronke, and Enzo.” And yet, when one looks more closely, it becomes clear that Žižek’s reading of du Maurier is far more complex than this. In the first place, implicit in the connection that he draws between the melodramatic excesses of her works and their embarrassingly direct staging of fantasies is an argument regarding the relationship between fantasy and form — an argument that suggests that melodrama is the form both by and through which literature most directly stages (and accesses) our fantasies. In the second place, this is a story of a fight for working people told from the workers’ point of view. So please click on the image and then make it larger if possible. Then allow yourself a day or two of returning to bed, to cultivate your inner world. Drink tea and read books on things like “radical beauty” by Deepak Chopra, an unlikely but optimistic beauty consultant, which will lead to going upstairs, eventually, and massaging one’s entire body with heated sesame oil. We had a house-guest from Senegal this Fall, Abulaye, a newly-arrived immigrant to these blatant shores, and he took one look at our shower, removed the no-slip mat AND the shower curtain, then stepped in. I had just done my Ayurvedic routine in it, and so this did not go well. He slipped, horribly, and didn’t tell us he had banged his head until we were up in Rocky Mountain National Park photographing the bored ubiquitous elk and he needed to sit down. In any case, this archipelago consists of ten principal islands, of which five exceed the others in size. They are situated under the Equator, and between five and six hundred miles westward of the coast of America. They are all formed of volcanic rocks; a few fragments of granite curiously glazed and altered by the heat, can hardly be considered as an exception. Some of the craters, surmounting the larger islands, are of immense size, and they rise to a height of between three and four thousand feet. Their flanks are studded by innumerable smaller orifices. I scarcely hesitate to affirm, that there must be in the whole archipelago at least two thousand craters. These consist either of lava and scoriæ, or of finely-stratified, sandstone-like tuff. Most of the latter are beautifully symmetrical; they owe their origin to eruptions of volcanic mud without any lava [...] Considering that these islands are placed directly under the equator, the climate is far from being excessively hot; this seems chiefly caused by the singularly low temperature of the surrounding water, brought here by the great southern Polar current. Excepting during one short season, very little rain falls, and even then it is irregular; but the clouds generally hang low. This brief display implies what is to come: many flickering letters put into motion and shaped into patterns before receding back into a blank screen. For example, the simple statement of the poem gradually forms on successive lines, sometimes letter by letter,

THIS IS THE SENTENCE THAT THE WIND BLEW HERE.

Entes ... Entes ... GHOSTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTRAIN

“ECARASEMP” “REVAIDECA” “RACONTRAO” “CORODOSIM”

St Matthew meets St David meets St Orm meets St Ranglehold meets St Luke meets St Gregory meets St Rain who gave birth to St Iff and St Ave this is the oldest family. They might ask each other why are we here? The offerings are top notch: Cheese and Onion Pudding, Chard and Saffron Tart, Creamy Asparagus Timbale, Whole Baked Eggplants, Rhubarb Fool, and Almond Pine-Nut Tart. We will work! We will feast first! Then we will work! cool at last a connection, i luv your pics ... jus got to my apartment and feelin kinda nauty, so I’m goin to take a chance wit u haha ... txtme lets talk more, num is +1-814.923 .0942 0r if u like blabbr — dollydimples61, you can find it in the app store. So yes, conditions in the migrant camps in Libya do suck: one 17-year-old boy brought to safety by MOAS told us how he had been forced to fight other detainees for food. Which sounds like something out of The A Team. Who killed the world? We forgot to water, we forgot to open the flue ...

the military workhorse throttled up to milliseconds

enna bleed bussy a fect’l

When I returned, years later, I found the same random patterns there on the wall. As Katsumi Omori said, “I must go to Fukushima. I must shoot the radiation (though it cannot be shot).” The resulting film imbues a concrete world with dream logic as it flows through three parts: Argentinean suburbs, Mozambique’s liminal grasslands, and the dense green of a Philippine jungle. But work isn’t stable or guaranteed, though that doesn’t seem to weigh too heavily on anyone. Their task remains enigmatic, more so after a coworker pulls out an odd black cone. Screens, wires, disarray, outages. But fuck that shit. Misha Mengelberg just died. Strange how I watched a video of him playing with Bennink and Dolphy just the other day. I’m glad we were cotemporaries, as they put it in the 19th century. Think about it. A good word. Co ... temporaries. I advance cautiously, on all fours at first, then find the earth penetrable, my limbs entering the soil as I move forward. Where it had seemed cold, the effects of the cold have passed; where there was weight, weight is undifferentiated, the pressure valve

turned two quarters to left traces of hair & skin twenty-three by twenty-three harmonic inches every slant is a tooth, albeit soft in the polystyrene conference hall; those that meet well eat first the head down sucker in structure, no moon to take the whole the day off.

Then Avalokitesvara despaired as he looked down into the hells which were rapidly filling up again even though he had emptied them many times through his teachings. He became so disheartened that his body shattered into thousands of pieces, true to his original vow. He cried to the Buddhas for help. Of the ones who came to him, one was Amitabha Buddha, who became his teacher and helped him take on a new form — a female one with a thousand hands to provide aid to those who suffered, and with the eyes of Wisdom in each of the palms. And thus Avalokitesvara became the goddess Kuan Yin. Then Kuan Yin despaired as she looked down into the hells which were rapidly filling up again even though she had emptied them many times through her compassion. She became so disheartened that her body shattered into thousands of pieces, true to Avalokitesvara’s original vow. She cried to the Buddhas for help. Of the ones who came to her, one was Amitabha Buddha, who became her teacher and helped her take on a new form — or forms, I should say, visible and invisible, each and every one of the “ten thousand things”, from subatomic particles to songs to galaxies, each with a myriad thousand hands to provide aid to those who suffered, and with the eyes of Love and Wisdom in each of the palms. And still the hells filled, seemingly faster than the speed of light. At this point, Gert of the Well starts laughing. He knows the Sultan is going to want to hear his story, tho there is nothing to be learned from it. He pulls himself up off the bed and goes into the bathroom, the relief of his old age. Blue and sea-green tiles gleam on the floor and the walls. The big basin occupies one whole side, two yards in length. It can be filled continuously from two pipes that pour in hot or cold water. The water, heated in a cistern on the floor above, is allowed to flow in as one wishes, and mixes with the cold water that comes down through the other pipe. He immerses himself in the warmth of the basin, motionless. Let the Sultan wait. This is all we want today. And yet ... and yet ... and yet the world swirls around us. We wake up in the night with just each others and admit that even while we believe that we want to believe that we all live in one bed of the earth’s atmosphere, our bed is just our bed and no one else’s ... So Huey calls a boycott of Cal-Pac. That led to us picketing Bill Boyette’s. Now I think there were about thirty guys in this association: liquor store and tavern owners. One was an ex-Raiders football player. I got to know him personally. His whole thing: “What do you want? I’ll give you. You guys are doing good work.” Bill Boyette was the guy who said, “No we don’t want these Black Panthers, and we’re not giving them a damn thing.” So we focused in on Bill Boyette’s two liquor stores. We put pickets up in front of these stores. So, getting down to the nitty-gritty, like I always say, the local alcoholics — community alcoholics, you know? — they’ve got themselves a little change, they’re going to want a short neck of wine, or something, and they used to come into Bill Boyette’s stores, right? So instead of cussing the local drunks out, I go all the way out to my man that owns the other liquor store. I say, “What is that, the alcoholics drink?” He says they got Tokay. He gave me two cases of this wine. I take it back over there, I say, “Now when the drunks come up, Huey, tell them you’ll give them a short neck of wine if they march in the pickets.” Next thing you know, all the Oakland drunks, instead of going into the store, they get in the picket line — they’re drunk as a skunk — “Boycott Bill Boyette.” So that’s how you do it. Dear Angel of Dust. You have become familiar in my neighborhood like the lady with the gold turban staring fixedly, silently, desperately through the window of Twin Donuts. You have become as familiar as the man with the face of wrinkled black velvet picking at mismatched sneakers, one with laces, as he hugs his knees bent over the bench in front of Häagen Dazs from which he battles 10-foot demons. What are you thinking behind your eternally-smiling face as you walk in and out of stores of with the wind chimes you hawk, bunched together like a handful of dead chickens? What are you thinking as the mobiles which need only wind to sing are rejected again and again? Dear Mama, you said it again when you watched me read poems at the Library of Congress of these here United States. Not bad for an immigrant. Dear Angel of Dust. Etcetera, etcetera ... Bahala na ... relationship, recovery, revelation, redress, rebellion, red, restoration, renaissance, redrawing, review, re________ ... from 147 Million Orphans. Dear Angel of. We watched F____ slice mushrooms delicately then spread thin segments on wood planks to dry under the sun. Dear Ange.

This tree will never grow. This bush Has no branches. I wonder how our mouths will look in twenty-five years When we say

I don’t understand why half the world is still crying, man, when the other half of the world is still crying too, man ...

I wonder how our mouths will look in twenty-five years When we say

Tomorrow never happens, it’s all the same fucking day, man ...

We’ll look like seaweed thrown Against a pier

A dead starfish on a beach

All the oceans of emotion [full stop] Are full of such fish

[Note: Sources: JBR; Diego Zúñiga, Camanchaca, (tr. Megan McDowell), quoted in Coffee House Press, “Two new titles, author events, and more in March”, email rec’d 1 Mar 017, approx. 10:04am PST; JBR; Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma; JBR; Elizabeth Robinson and Jack Collom, “lunes”, in Dot’s Diner, at SPD; JBR; Gloria Anzaldúa, “Foreword to Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit”, in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (ed. AnaLouise Keating); JBR; AC Shilton, “What Would Happen if All the Bees Died Tomorrow?”, at Tonic, 1 Mar 017; Lorna Mills, quoted in Mira Dayal, “‘Everything I Do Has the Smell of Digital’: Lorna Mills on Her Art”, at Hyperallergic, 1 Mar 017; Allison Meier “The Psychedelic Pollution Floating in the Gowanus Canal”, at Hyperallergic, 28 Mar 017 (on photos by Steven Hirsch); Chung-Wha Hong, Grassroots International, “Remembering Berta Cáceres”, email rec’d 2 Mar 017, approx. 6:06am PST, and Beverly Bell, “Berta Cáceres, Presente!”, at Foreign Policy in Focus, 10 Mar 016; JBR; an unnamed friend of Alana Siegel, quoted in Siegel’s“Alana Siegel reviews Katy Bohinc”, at Journal of Poetics Research 2 (a review of Bohinc’s Dear Alain), JBR, but see “List of Presidents of the United States who owned slaves”, at Wikipedia); Isidore Isou, “The New Letteric Alphabet”, in Lettrisme: Into the Present (ed. Stephen C Foster); JBR; Jonty Tiplady, Poetry is Historicist, This Is My Only Poem; Jasmin Tsou, “Portfolio by Dan Herschlein”, at BOMB, 2 Mar 017; JBR; Nick Demske, “Feces in the Beast Wagon”, “Harry Toufe”, at Gramma; “Shape-shifting molecular robots respond to DNA signals”, at Science Daily, 2 Mar 017; JBR; Jo Lindsay Walton, “Run-On Sentences”, at Academia.edu; a little mash of a google search result for “moom moom poem”, Jo Lindsay Walton, and JBR; Jo Lindsay Walton, “Run-On Sentences”, at Academia.edu; Russell Sbriglia, “Introduction: Did Somebody Say Žižek and Literature?”, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek (ed. Russell Sbriglia), via link in Duke University Press, “New Book: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek”, email rec’d 3 Mar 017, approx. 7:00am PST; JBR; Jeremy Corbyn, blurb for Mark Lyon, The Battle for Grangemouth: A Worker’s Story, in Lawrence & Wishart, “Out now: The Battle of Grangemouth by Mark Lyon”, email rec’d 3 Mar 017, approx. 7:04am PST; JBR, (includes a note appended to “1000 Views of 'Girl, Singing' poem: The Secret Life of an Angel, by Elizabeth Arnold”, at ZS, 2 Mar 017; Bhanu Kapil, “Note on the Last Day”, at The Writer in the World; JBR; Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N., in Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Writings (ed. James A Secord); CT Funkhauser, bpNichol, “After the Storm”, Lenora de Barros, “Entes ... Entes ...”, bpNichol, “Poem for My Father”, Eduardo Kac, “Não”, in Funkhauser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995; a mash of Julia Blumenreich, “Oh When the Saints”, in arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott (where it is accidentally considered a work by Ott, per an inlaid note from the publisher), and bpNichol, The Martyrology Book 1; JBR; “Magda”, message via Zorpia, 3 Mar 017, which I signed up for because apparently Jonty Tiplady left me a message there (not that I found one; he said it was a mistake; I have since quit); JBR; “Humanitarian Conditions in Libya”, at MOAS; JBR; Angharad, in Mad Max: Fury Road; Julia Blumenreich, “At Your Tribute: A Black t-shirt, White Letters, ‘Not Dead Yet’”, a slip laid into arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott; Gil Ott, “Shuttle Challenger”, “Stingere”, Traffic, in arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott; JBR; Katsumi Omori, quoted in Marc Feustel, “Photobooks After 3/11”, at Marc Feustel (reprinted/posted/reposted/whatever from The PhotoBook Review, Issue 008, April 2015); Danielle Burgos, “The Human Surge”, at BOMB, 3 Mar 017 (re Eduardo Williams, The Human Surge); JBR; Gil Ott, “The Hawk”, in arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott; Verity Spott, “Slack Against the Committee – A Charm”, at Two Torn Halves, 2 Mar 017; JBR; “Avalokitesvara and the origins of the goddess Kuan Yin”, at Goddess Gift; JBR; Luther Blissett / Wu Ming, Q (tr. Shaun Whiteside); Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003”, in The Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Issa; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003”, in The Connection of Everyone with Lungs; JBR; Bobby Seale, quoted in Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Eileen R Tabios, “The Conductor”, “Dear Mama,”, in IMMIGRANT: Hay(na)ku & Other Poems In A New Land; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Eileen R Tabios, “The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon”, “Hay(na)ku with Ducktail”, “from 147 Million Orphans / Haybun MMXIV” in IMMIGRANT: Hay(na)ku & Other Poems In A New Land; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Eileen R Tabios, “From ‘The Ineffability of Mushrooms’”, in IMMIGRANT: Hay(na)ku & Other Poems In A New Land; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Jack Spicer, “For Russ”, in Admonitions; Janis Joplin, “Ball and Chain” (live, Toronto, July 4, 1970, during the train tour across Canada); Jack Spicer, “For Russ”, in Admonitions; Janis Joplin, “Ball and Chain” (live, Toronto, July 4, 1970, during the train tour across Canada); JBR; Jack Spicer, “For Harvey”, “For Mac”, in Admonitions]